Benghazi probe: "access to documents and witnesses — that is the lifeblood of an investigation"

Gowdy  says  administration  slowing  Benghazi  probe

Gowdy's investigation has been savaged for dragging late into election season — but he says it's not his fault

By Rachael Bade

05/06/16 05:23 AM EDT

For months, critics of the House Benghazi Committee have slammed Chairman Trey Gowdy for dragging his investigation into the middle of the election cycle. Just last week, a top Pentagon official sharply rebuked the panel for making new interview requests 22 months after the probe began.  But the South Carolina Republican has an answer for his detractors: It’s the Obama administration’s fault.

Gowdy, in an interview with POLITICO, said the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon are to blame for his investigation’s snail-like pace, arguing they’ve slow-walked the hand-over of documents and interviews with key witnesses. “It’s taken way too long and way too much of our energy in simply gaining access,” Gowdy said. “There continues to be time wasted negotiating with executive branch entities who do not want to give us what I believe Congress is entitled to.”

Right now, for example, he’s sparring with the Defense Department over interviews with military drone pilots and camera operators who flew missions over Libya the night of the attack. The Pentagon doesn’t see the point of the interviews and said they would be a waste of resources.  But Gowdy remains unswayed by those objections: “There are witnesses we had to insist on and then we were told no, then we were told we can’t find them, and then we were told, ‘It would take X,Y, Z and you don’t want to do all that,’ and there were all these excuses… There is no way we can do this investigation without talking to these people… and it takes time.”

In the interview, the former federal prosecutor sounded frustrated, even peppering answers with one or two uncharacteristic expletives he rarely uses like “hell” and "damn." He said some document requests from his panel have taken a year to be answered. In other instances, documents still haven’t been turned over at all, including interagency meeting records from the week after the attack.

Democrats say Gowdy’s making excuses. They argue he wasted a full year and half of his time trying to unearth dirt on Hillary Clinton's leadership of State before pivoting this winter to probe the military response to the attacks — all in an effort to extend the probe. He could have done parallel probes of Defense and the CIA while working on State matters in 2014 and 2015, they say, blasting the panel for waiting until much later to focus on those agencies.

And even Fox News host Greta Van Susteren warned last year that “dragging the investigation into 2016 looks political… sends a bad message about fairness.”
“This has nothing to do with federal agencies and everything to do with Select Committee Republicans not even making many of their requests until after their disastrous hearing with Secretary Clinton, which even Republicans criticized as a monumental flop,” said top Benghazi Democrat Elijah Cummings. “Republicans have been spending their time scheduling dozens of new interviews — which they could have conducted long ago — to justify their own existence, drag out this investigation as close as they can to the election."

Gowdy knows the longer he waits the more Democrats will pillory him — and it could potentially skew the public opinion of his findings: “Nothing gets better with time, except maybe wine — but investigations do not. I wanted to have this done in December 2015… But you have to have access to documents and witnesses — that is the lifeblood of an investigation… And when one side controls documents and the witnesses and the other group is trying to conduct the investigation, that creates something of a quandary.”

The slow-walking, Gowdy says, started early with a clearance problem. He tapped three-star Lt. Gen. Dana Chipman as his chief counsel in July 2014. But the former Army Judge Advocate General didn’t get his security clearance until January the following year.

“What a sketchy background he had: the former head of the legal department of the United States Army,” Gowdy said, noting delays they faced for other staff and getting their internal clearance system approved by the CIA.

According to Gowdy, one of the biggest roadblocks stemmed from State's slow production of documents. For example, investigators requested materials related to State’s years-old internal probe of the attack — findings which some Republicans think Clinton advisers influenced. State did not turn them all over in 2013 when another panel subpoenaed them, and more than a year later it still took about seven months for State to give them to Gowdy's committee, the panel says.

A State Department official called the request "unprecedented." "To our knowledge, in the history of the State Department, Congress has never subpoenaed the working files or testimony from an independent [investigation]," the official added. "We have made clear our concerns about the chilling impact this disclosure will likely have on the work of future reports."

The Benghazi panel had the same problem with requests for emails from several State officials. While they asked for copies of top official Patrick Kennedy's correspondence in November 2014, for instance, it took until Jan. 21, 2016 for them to receive the last of the messages — more than a year later, they said.

And the panel continued receiving batches of State messages throughout 2015 and into spring of this year — some well after the panel had finished the relevant interviews, Gowdy says. Fox News reported Thursday night that Gowdy had secured $4 million to help State process Congressional requests quicker, but the panel feels that hasn't done much good.

The panel also suspects many of the document productions are incomplete. In June 2015, several months after State gave the committee an 800-page stack of Clinton’s Benghazi-related messages, the panel discovered an additional batch of Clinton Libya-related messages that hadn't been turned over. They only turned up after the committee subpoenaed longtime Clinton confidante and advisor Sidney Blumenthal for his messages on Libya.

A couple weeks later, State gave the panel copies of those Blumenthal messages too, arguing they did not realize the panel wanted all her Libya-policy correspondence, a broader request than Benghazi material alone. They'd go on to give the committee its biggest production of her messages, about 1,900 pages, in late September 2015 just weeks before Clinton's testimony.

In late February and early April this year, State also handed additional records in part belonging to Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills and deputies Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan. It also passed over documents they accidentally “retired” addition after the panel initially subpoenaed them in early 2015.
The Department said officials just realized this winter those messages were never given over and they were delivered once the oversight was uncovered. But Gowdy said he was skeptical: "I guess if something happens one time, you have defense of incompetence but when it happens 101 times and it is continuing to happen? I don’t think sheer incompetence explains it.”

State Department spokesman Mark Toner disputed Gowdy's comments, saying State "has been cooperating with the Select Committee since its inception.  We have made over 50 document productions totaling nearly 100,000 pages, and more than 50 current and former Department employees have provided testimony, often requiring them to travel from overseas," he said. "Many of the documents we’ve provided recently are duplicative of documents the committee has already received. Furthermore, other documents were provided directly in response to the Committee’s shifting priorities. These documents do not change the essential facts or our understanding of the events before, during, or after the attacks, which have been known since [State's internal report] on the Benghazi attacks was released more than three years ago.”

Many late-to-arrive State documents, Gowdy says, included information they wanted to ask Clinton staffers about. One was a December 2012 email between Mills and Kennedy discussing state’s internal investigation and several staffers deemed “deficient.” Another included a September 2011 Libya policy memo advocating for a reduction in the U.S. presence in Libya, in part authored by Jake Sullivan. "You’re deprived of the ability to ask something that’s important to us,” Gowdy said, noting that he would have asked Sullivan about the memo.

A State official said those documents were outside of a narrow range of dates the panel asked them to prioritize and argued they "do not change the essential facts or our understanding of the events before, during, or after the attacks." But State hasn’t been the only hold up, Republicans say. In 2014, the CIA refused to give the panel a batch of several thousand pages worth of documents it allowed a previous Hill committee investigation to keep. Committee members were told in early 2015 they had to drive to CIA’s Langley, Va. office to read them, Gowdy said, and staffers weren’t allowed to take their notes from the building.

The panel said the agency waited until the summer of 2015 to deliver a “critical” message that confirmed there was no protest in Benghazi the night of the attack — an email they say shows who knew that information and when. Other information they requested to see early last year they just received access to last month.

“The intelligence agency is generally not interested in oversight, and it’s not just our committee — there’s a general reluctance to share with Congress period,” Gowdy said. It’s gotten better over time, he continued, “but we’re closing in on two years into this… It’s taken way too long and it’s taken way too much of our energy in simply gaining access.”

In January of this year the panel interviewed several current and former military leaders who referred them to new military personnel, Gowdy said, including some who were overseas the night of the attack. The Pentagon, however, says that answering those requests are draining their resources, and encouraged the panel to limit some requests to commanders and top officials. “I appreciate fact that they made generals available to me. They have a perspective,” Gowdy said. “But so do people who were on the ground receiving orders.”

Gowdy said he’s spending the last months of his probe trying to reconcile testimony and documents about the military’s response to the call for help in Benghazi. They’re “painstakingly gaining access to the people making decisions that night," he said, and have had what he called some of the “most informative witnesses yet.” One former military official approached the panel recently with new information, he said — though he wouldn't reveal specifics.

“There is, I don’t want to say conflicting testimony but testimony that is not harmonized,” Gowdy said. “So the witnesses I am interested in at this point are witnesses that can fill in blanks… Anyone who can help me understand the decisions made and not made and timing behind them.”

The panel to this day says it has not received all the relevant emails for undersecretary for political affairs Wendy Sherman or assistant secretary Jeffrey Feltman. Nor have they received a list of document descriptions of those materials withheld from the panel. They still don’t have an inter-agency senior official meetings records from week after the attack, and they’re trying to get DOD visual evidence they’ve been unable to access.
"All along I have been happy to skip the drama and get the documents, but in the process we’ve got lots of drama and not all the documents,” Gowdy said.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/trey-gowdy-benghazi-probe-222867